Case Study

Customer Success Story: Substack + Decagon

“With Decagon’s AI agents, we’ve shortened our time-to-resolution rate, raised and maintained a high CSAT and deflection rate, and are proactively engaging our most valuable readers and publishers. Decagon has significantly enhanced our approach to support by automating routine tasks, allowing our support agents to dedicate more time to initiatives for writers and creators that benefit from a personal touch. As a result, we’re able to deliver an even higher level of service to publishers and their subscribers.”

Jamil A.

Product Operations

Overview

With Substack, anyone can start a publication that combines a personal website, blog, and email newsletter or podcast. Substack’s subscription network has grown to more than 35 million active subscriptions and more than 3 million paid subscriptions since 2017. As Substack continues to add readers and creators to their platform, they are thoughtfully managing a high volume of support requests while being intentional with how they’re growing their support team.

The Problem

Tasked with scaling their support operations, the Substack team initially built a chatbot in-house to manage their customer conversations. They soon realized that managing responses was only part of the solution and identified the need for a more complete AI Agent to address:

High Support Volume: Substack’s support team frequently handled repetitive Tier 1 requests, such as cancellation requests and importing emails. Their support team was managing each conversation manually, so it became increasingly challenging to maintain efficient and high-quality responses to all inquiries in a timely manner.
Lack of Segmentation: In order to provide tailored support, Substack wanted a tagging and routing system to better understand and address the diverse needs of their community, whether they are publishers, subscribers, or part of their free or paid tiers.
Limited Insights: Substack’s in-house solution focused on response management, but did not provide insights into user analytics or trends. This made it difficult to understand the Voice of the Customer and uncover areas of improvement across their CX operations more holistically.
Scaling Challenges: In addition to managing their existing support volume, the Substack team wanted to proactively engage select publishers to help them grow their publications. This proactive approach would increase overall support volume, so they needed an AI Agent that could handle the additional influx of customer engagement.

The Solution

Substack partnered with Decagon to launch:

AI-Powered Chatbot: Decagon implemented an AI Agent capable of handling and resolving more than 90% of user inquiries, significantly reducing the burden on the existing support team.
Custom Segmentation Filters: Decagon added tags and custom filters to help Substack provide its community with tailored, contextual support (e.g. monetization suggestions for high-earning writers to convert free subscribers).
Voice of Customer Insights: By tagging historical conversations, Substack can understand the publisher and subscribers’ biggest pain points, track contact drivers, fill in product or documentation gaps, and escalate feature requests.
Workflow Integration: Tracking feature requests and reporting bugs used to be a manual process, but Decagon is able to automatically identify, track, and report feature requests and bugs by integrating directly with Substack’s existing customer support tools.

The Result

Decagon’s AI agents provide Voice of Customer insights, segment users, and dig into customer trends, which has delivered consistent results for the Substack team, including:

Increased Support Capacity: Substack has scaled their capacity to resolve support volume in a fast and accurate way, without increasing their team size.
Higher Customer Satisfaction: Decagon’s AI Agent has helped Substack successfully resolve more than 90% of user questions without human intervention, leading to consistently high CSAT and deflection rates, as well as a shorter time-to-resolution rate for all customers.
Dedicated Resources for High-Value Users: With Decagon, the support team can now dedicate more time to helping top writers and creators with growth, marketing, and product-related inquiries, which adds to their overall revenue generation.

Want to see how Decagon can deliver consistently high ROI for your CX team? Reach out to us at sales@decagon.ai to see how we can help!

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